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urban in the sense that it lives in communities of over 2,000. This relatively low degree of urbanization in view of the advanced industrial development is explained by the absence of domestic fuels and the concomitant necessity in earlier days for Swedish industry to disperse along rivers and streams, the most economical sources of power. There are numerous small plants along the waterways, particularly in the north, where mining and forestry are important industries. For this reason some demographers have counted as urban all communities in Sweden of over 200 inhabitants. The highly developed public works and social welfare programs provide many of these small communities with the basic amenities of urban living. Using this criterion, Sweden is about 80% urbanized.

The internal migration of the population has meant a continuing shift out of the north and out of the rural areas into urban centers in the south. The most important of those expanding urban centers are Greater Stockholm, with offshoots extending toward Uppsala, Enkoping, and Sodertalje; urban places in western Sweden centering on Goteborg; and western Malmobus province in the south. Of the approximately 132 towns and cities in Sweden, however, only five exceed 100,000 people (Stockholm—747,490, Goteborg—446,875, Malmo—258,311, Vasteras—113,389, and Uppsala—101,696), and only 17 have more than 50,000 inhabitants. The population in these 22 cities accounts for 33% of the total population; this proportion rises to about 45% if suburbs are included.

The rural population is concentrated in the cultivated areas, namely the plains of Skane and Halland, the Malaren Lake District, Ostergotland, Vastergotland, Varmland, the river valleys in Dalarna, and the Gota Kanal valley. Rural settlements in the past consisted of both villages with the inhabitants attending outlying fields and single farms. During the sweeping land reforms of the 19th century, however, the villages were either split up or greatly changed, and today they appear more as clusters of private farms. The most common type of dwelling in rural areas is now the private farm, although in certain districts numerous remnants of the older building arrangements give the landscape a distinctive local character.

2. Ethnic types

Because of Sweden's relative geographic isolation, no significant ethnic mixing took place from the end of the Viking period (around 1050) to the mid-20th century. The population is remarkably homogenous, with only about 5% consisting of outside strains. Nearly half of this very small nonindigenous group is from southern and Eastern Europe, having been introduced in the post-World War II period to relieve the labor shortage. The only linguistic and ethnic minorities which have long been resident in Sweden are the 10,000 Lapps of the far north and the Finnish-speaking population, numbering about 50,000 along the border with Finland. Several thousand gypsies have bene resident in Sweden since the last century and have been the subject of special laws and ordinances. Figure 4 shows a typically Nordic woman and child, the overwhelmingly predominant strain, and a Lapplander.

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